An overwhelming majority of female-owned businesses (88%, to be exact) are run by women who do not have a single employee. That means they are essentially doing everything on their own. And if you are pursuing growth, then running your company without any support is not a sustainable business model!

As a business owner, you will unlock different tiers of problems that you need to solve. While working with folks inside the Incubator, we’ve encountered many questions that we would categorize as ‘next level.’ We realized we have a lot we can help those people with. That’s what’s led us to introduce a brand new offer. We are so excited to talk about our new opportunity for people!

These are people who entered the Incubator, thinking that the next step for them was to start hiring more people. Spoiler alert: it wasn’t that! Instead, we worked with them on refining their offer so that they could start getting paid appropriately. Once they start getting those achievable results, they’re in the position to start looking for more people to hire.

Many of our Incubator graduates reach a point where they slowly want to remove themselves from some of the deliverables of their service. They want to be involved with strategy and direction, but they’re ready for everything else to fall to their team. They’re ready for the next phase, and this can be intimidating! This is not less work for them. In fact, at first, it’s more work. After that, it’s different work.

This isn’t about removing your job from the business. It’s shifting your focus to different aspects of the business. It will require you to grow and evolve as a manager, leader, and CEO. You’re going to go from just being the person who founded the business to sitting in a true CEO or leader’s seat. It’s such an exciting thing for us to see!

We have been seeing many frustrating things in the business world lately, so today, we talk about marketing ploys and business strategies that we don’t align with. We strongly believe that if you work with a coach, you should ensure that that person lives their life and runs their business in a way that aligns with your belief system so that you can create a life and a business that you really, truly want.

Today we are diving into what you need to get right in your service-based business. This has a dramatic effect across the board and will either make your business very successful or lead to its failure! The people getting this wrong are often the ones who are on the road to burnout, are overworked and underpaid, they feel like everything is working against them and all systems are broken, they’re not reaching their financial goals and don’t understand why, and they don’t know where all their time is going.

Today we're talking about creating an intranet (which we also refer to as a “garage”) for your company. This is separate from the project management of your day-to-day operations. This is more about setting the precedent for your company culture, creating SOPs, and focusing on other high level elements that are essential to the running of a successful business. You can think of it as Union Station for your team, your clients, and you!

Until we had an intranet in our business, we wouldn’t have known it was missing. Now, we can’t imagine ever living without it! It has been so useful in so many ways. At first we used it only internally, but then we decided to branch out and use it to enhance our clients’ experience, and the results have been incredible.

Most people who go into business are usually technicians who are really skilled at one area of the business. Learning to be a leader in your business is the most challenging part of running a business. Here’s the hierarchy we see: you’re a technician, and then hopefully you begin to love sales too. Then, hopefully, you begin to learn and love how to be a leader. If you don’t like sales, then we would say, don’t start a business. That doesn’t mean it’s impossible to find a way to sell that is in alignment with you, but you do absolutely have to find a way to like it.

We’ve been asked countless times about our business partnership and our take on whether we feel that partnership is a good route. We’ve been in a partnership from the get-go, and clients are often curious as to how we manage communication and generally maintain a healthy working relationship. In this episode, we tackle the cons of partnership: why you should never get into one and why, and the next episode will explore the pros. Naturally, there are potential issues that can arise and cause tension in a partnership, and today we identify what to look out for if you’re considering partnering up with someone. You’ll discover a few of the, dare we say, many drawbacks of partnership, the requirements for maintaining a successful partnership, and the principal cause of partnerships (and subsequently, businesses) going down in flames!

Today we are talking about hiring in the current economic climate. The biggest layoffs since 2008 are taking place at the moment, and layoffs in the technology industry have actually surpassed those that took place during the Great Recession.

The common trend that we are seeing amongst business owners who have been operating for more than four years is a collective desire to move away from being the “doers” in their business and shift towards a leadership position where they can focus more on strategy and creative direction. This means needing to hire people who can take up the “implementer” type of work. A lot of the work we are doing with our clients is around how to make this pivot as smooth and successful as possible! It’s a challenge, but it’s such an important move to make if you are going to take your business to the next level.

A lot of our clients are currently in a space where they are wanting to add to their team but have concerns over how to make the right choices while maintaining the character and values of their company. We’ve recently expanded our team, and while it has come with some lessons, it has been an incredibly rewarding experience for our company and our team! In today’s episode, we unpack the five biggest barriers to trust, as outlined in an article by Fast Company called 5 Barriers To Break in Order To Build Trust Between Coworkers. We discuss the rules that all high-trust companies follow to ensure employees feel secure and confident in their work environment.

We talk so often about financial literacy and creating sustainable businesses online that we’ve had a handful of clients ask us questions about bookkeeping. Based on all of the questions that come in, there are some things we want to share with our listeners about how to make sure that you have a bookkeeper that’s really well suited to you. Whether you’re interviewing someone for the first time or looking to get the most out of your existing relationship, this episode is for you.

Our mission in business is to help more women build profitable, sustainable businesses online. So much of that success is rooted in proper financial literacy. It’s so important to understand how to manage your finances so that you can take out enough money to live the life you want while at the same time ensuring that you leave enough money in the business so that it remains profitable in the long run. As you scale, money management becomes more complicated, but thankfully there are several different software options for payroll, accounting, and bookkeeping that can help!

Anytime we have a big growth year, the year to follow is one to watch. It’s a lot of working on the business and less working in the business. We put systems back in place, bring operations up to date, and tackle all the things we were too busy to attend to the year before. We had to work some of this out while hiring seven employees. We find that identifying and communicating your focus for the year can make all the difference.

One recommendation we have is to figure out whether you’re in a red, yellow, or green year. Do you need to stop and do the bare minimum, maintain what you have, or go big or go home? Whichever method you choose, it feels better to remind yourself that you intentionally chose this as you are making decisions throughout the year.

In the process of reflecting on our mistakes and successes for 2022, we realized that all of the “mistakes” (except one) that we’ve made, we would actually classify as lessons-learned instead. So, in this episode, we go over the key lessons that we’ve learned this past year and some of our most memorable success stories. Overall, this year was very challenging but we are feeling so good about what we’re creating, who is along for the ride with us, and what 2023 holds!

Recent developments in the AI space are undoubtedly going to change our world. The most significant shift is the launch of OpenAI’s ChatGPT which can create any content according to refined prompts. OpenAI has multiple other bots that utilize different databases, but ChatGPT is the one that got the most press and is publicly setting the precedent for what’s to come. We don’t believe that AI will take jobs immediately, but that it absolutely will in the long term. In this episode, we look at the impact of AI in the near future versus the long-term future, its implications and benefits, and the evolution of job creation in the new world!